Have You Fed The Dogs Yet?

A sermon preached on Sunday, 5 July 2009
at Pilgrim Congregational Church - Chattanooga, Tennessee

by Charles H. Lippy, LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus, UTC

Scripture:  Isaiah 56:1, 6-8 & Matthew 15:21-28

Just over a decade ago after my father had died, my mother and I took to talking on the phone each evening as a way to bridge the 850 miles that separated us. We alternated making the calls, but Mother had an uncanny ability to phone just as I was trying to feed the dogs. And with at least six at any one time--and sometimes up to eight--that is a major undertaking. It's one you don't want to stop once the process is underway unless you want a cacophony of barking. So many times when I answered the phone, I would hear my mother saying simply, "Have you fed the dogs yet?"--a code, almost, to inquire whether it was a good time to chat.

Those conversations lurked in my mind as I probed the texts for this morning. Jesus is on the road again, going in the direction of Tyre and Sidon, two areas with a small Jewish population. Along the way, a Canaanite woman rushes to him with a desperate plea on behalf of her mentally ill young daughter. Any parent can empathize with this mother's cry, for apparently all efforts to alleviate the condition had faltered. Jesus was the last hope. And what does Jesus do?  According to Matthew, "he did not answer her a word." He just ignored her. Admittedly, my first reaction was to be somewhat offended at this response. After all, didn't Mary and Joseph do a better job raising Jesus so that he would speak to someone who called out to him first?  Where were his manners? You'd think he was a Yankee!

But then I remembered that this was a Canaanite woman. No good Jewish boy would violate custom by speaking to a woman other than his mother, wife, sister, daughter, or servant. After all, women were property, and to speak to any woman without blood, marriage, or servitude ties was to assert some sort of claim to property that belonged to another. Jesus got into hot water with the Jewish authorities often enough for breaking laws and traditions; maybe, he thought, it was better this time to play by the rules. And add to the dilemma the fact that the woman was a Canaanite. Not only were Canaanites Gentiles, and therefore beyond the pale, but they were just about the worst of the worst from the proverbial other side of the tracks, though the biblical depictions of them may be about as accurate as portrayals of Barack Obama by Rush Limbaugh. In scripture, Canaanites are cast as enemies of Israel who practiced worship that involved bizarre dancing around the altar and ritual prostitution. The Psalmist says they sacrificed their children to demons and gave their blood as offerings to idols (Ps 106). No wonder Leviticus 19 says, "You shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan."

So Jesus is being a typical Jewish male here. And common Jewish practice had long forgotten the words of Isaiah that we heard, words penned as the Hebrew people returned to their promised land from exile in Babylon. They were told then that even the outcasts of Israel and foreigners who acknowledged the Lord would be welcomed into the covenant of faith, for the Lord's house was to be a house of prayer for all peoples, not just those already gathered. No, by Jesus' day, the world was "us" or "them." Jew or Gentile. Male or female. Clean or unclean. In or out. Those who were in were those who were just like us, and those who were out--well, that took in everyone not just like us.

Even the disciples pick up on this "us and them" contrast when they beg Jesus to send the Canaanite woman away. And he tries, claiming that he has come only--and there is real emphasis on only here--to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Not Canaanites. Not women. Not any of "them."

I suspect deep down inside most of us also wish that the Canaanite woman would just go away. After all, it's easier to mouth the words of faith when we're among friends, when we're with our own kind, when we are nestled in our comfort zones. So today congregations hire church marketing specialists to survey neighborhoods and come up with formulas so local churches can fill the pews with other folks just like us; never mind the homeless or the hungry. A little under 40 years ago when I was still in graduate school, I was visiting my family in upstate New York. As I usually did on such visits, I went to the church where I had grown up so I could practice the organ. This particular day as I stopped in the church office to chat with the secretary (who happened to be the mother of one of my childhood friends), another lady from the congregation was there ranting about a young man who had been at worship the previous Sunday. Now this was the early 1970s. And apparently this visitor had rather long hair, quite the style at the time. In style or not, he was not to this woman "one of us" as she sniffed, "They shouldn't let people who look like that inside the church." Us and them. And a year or so later, this fellow who should have been kept out of the house of prayer for all people became my brother-in-law.

When I was teaching at Clemson University in South Carolina, I was privileged to be part of a vital United Methodist Congregation. Recognizing that the South Carolina Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church had the largest sheer number and proportion of African American members of any in the connection, this congregation--all white--covenanted to work towards receiving an African American as senior pastor. When the day came and the new pastor's name was announced, I asked the woman sitting next to me at worship what she thought. Her reply was telling: "Well, we could have gotten a woman preacher." Race. Gender. Us. Them. And yes, some folks left the congregation--including the aunt and uncle of a man elected a bishop of the church in 2004. Let's not get out of our comfort zone. Send those not like us away along with the Canaanite woman.

About the same time, I got a phone call from a Baptist family living in the next county. Now in South Carolina, it's been said, there are more Baptists than people. So it wasn't a surprise that they were Baptists. What was a surprise was the request they made, almost like the Canaanite woman in our text. They had heard about me and knew I was ordained, although not serving a parish. They lived next door to their small country church, tended its lawn, served as volunteer custodians. But their son had recently returned home and he was in the hospital. "Would you visit him?" they asked. "Our pastor will not go see him," they said," because he's gay and he has AIDS. In fact, we've been asked not to come back to the church as long as he's here with us." So I went to the hospital. And what a moment of grace it was for all of us over the next several months, for in those days, it seemed, an AIDS diagnosis ended in death. But how hard it was for this family--and for me--to live in a world where the church was "us" and everyone else was "them." Social class. Hairstyle. Race. Gender. Illness. Sexual orientation. The Canaanite woman.

But the Canaanite woman refused to be silenced even when Jesus made a rather nasty statement about comparing her with a dog. "It's not fair," he proclaimed, "to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." No household pets like my seven. No indeed. But wild beasts, unclean curs, mongrel scavengers. Sort of what I recall being said when I was in college about someone not part of the in group--"he or she's a real dog."

But the woman outsmarts even Jesus. "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." How well I know that. Whenever I have folks to dinner, the dogs gather round. They don't beg while we're eating. But be careful if you move your chair, for they will be stretched out under the table and behind the chairs, knowing that once the meal is over, they are in for a treat, crumbs that fall from the table.

The woman's persistence pays off. Sometimes the only way to get results may be the "in your face" approach she takes, even while the rest of us mumble, "I just wish they (fill in the blank for whoever 'they' are) wouldn't flaunt it in public." But in her persistence, Jesus sees the faith that post-exilic Isaiah had anticipated: "Great is your faith," he finally acknowledges. "Great is your faith." And he grants her request.

Now the tables are turned. What was out is in. The outcast is welcomed into the covenant people. The barriers even the disciples erected to keep their comfort zones safe from contamination came down. That's scary. When the walls come down, when there's no more "us" and "them," we expose the element of hypocrisy in all of us that we try so desperately to hide. And it all had to do with the dogs. "Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."

It's been nearly seven years now since my mother died. Even so, when the phone rings in the early hours of the evening, I sometimes rush to answer, expecting yet to hear her voice. And then I pause and think: little did my mother know that on those many occasions when I answered the phone, she was speaking the truth of God, the truth of the gospel, when she asked that simple question, "Have you fed the dogs yet?" And that is the question I would ask each of you this morning. Have you fed the dogs yet? Amen.

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